Saturday, August 31, 2013

The
Fog Of War:
Surveys show that a majorty of the American people do not want their
nation to attack Syria. A vast majority say that President Droner
should have congressional approval before commencing yet another war.
There's not a snowball's chance in Damascus that these citizens will
have any impact at all on the determined march to war the Washington
lemmings are on. (I'm on vacation and don't gonna comment on this
idiocy again until it is underway.)

Rinsed
& Repeated:
The Dodd-Frank Actrequired banks keep at least 5% of any loan they
secuirtized – so they would have some money in the game and not be
quite so cavalier about the dreck they were peddling. Now federal
regulators have re-defined that to require the banks keep 5% of at
least 2% of the crap they are palming off on the public. Hey,
anybody here remember 2007?

Rank
Ranking:
Put the following in their proper order of odorliness: Attorneys,
Banksters, Congresscritters.

Keeping
Score:
The investigations underway by Justice and the SEC into some 200
instances of bribery by JPMorgan in its Asian businesses have been
helped by an internal JPMorgan spreadsheet which contained the dates
and businesses and so on for... well, for nearly 200 instances of
bribery. It's what the pros call “a clue”.

Reality
Check:
Does welfare really pay better than working? No, of course not. Can
you fiddle with statistics to argue that it does? Well, sure. Would
those on the right do such a thing? Well, sure. Will these
falsifications be quoted as a reason to cut social spending? Of
course, that's why the did it. That's always why they do it. They
being the Cato Institute, this time.

Union
Drones:
Olny 99.5% of those greedy, lazy, over-paid, self-centered teachers
use their own money to buy classroom supplies for their students.
What's wrong with these people, don't they know they're no good?
Why, they even stuff
food in the backpacks of many of their poorest kids so they'll
have something to eat over the weekend.

Priorities:
Mayor Bloomberg's city – that stop-and-frisk everyone who choses
not the be white kind of city which paid $700 million to its abused
citizens last year – won't spend $1 million to equip the cops with
wearable cameras (small enough to fit on their lapels) that would
record what the cop was actually doing. Why? Because it would ruin
the cops privacy to do what ever the hell they want to.

Big
Frogs In Small Ponds:
The 'revised' GDP growth rate for 2Q13 is 2.5%, giving the firsst
half of the wear a stunning 1.8% growth rate on top of the
4-quarter's 1.6% growth. Don't go getting all excited, the early
stats for the third quarter aren't all that good either.

The
Times They Are A'Changing:
On Saturday, August 31, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
officiated at a same-sex marriage ceremony. Way to go, Ruthie!

He
Said:
“The people who congratulated themselves for saving the world in
1999 were actually setting the world up for a far worse crisis, just
a few years later.”

Pivot
Point: AG Holder now says
that the feds will concentrate their anti-marijuana efforts on those
with ties to criminal organizations, the trafficking to children and
transporting the weed across state lines – in states where pot has
been legalized. Not
to be outdone, the Treasury and IRS say that they'll recognize
same-sex marriages for federal tax purposes, no matter where the
legally-married gays now live. The R's ain't gonna like either of
these.

Clip
& Save:"At the risk of being called a crackpot
again, I repeat my forecasts of 450 for the S&P, sub-1% US 10y
yields and gold above $10,000." Albert Edwards of Societe
Generale,

Raining
On The Parade:
Has the shale bubble burst? Burst? Bubble? What bubble? We're
gonna be rich I tell you, rich. Don't tell me that shale gas is
going to be limited and that the high financial and human cost of
fracking mean that energy forever needs to be revised to energy for a
few years. Don't want to hear it. Depletion? Hell, just drill
baby drill. What do you mean all the good spots have already been
drilled... or that the gas you're getting won't pay for drilling the
holes... or that your liability insurance for ruining all those
water wells is getting too expensive...

The
Untouchables: Only 47% of
55-64 year-olds who lose their jobs get another one, and that only
after about 46 weeks. And of those who do manage to get hired make
about 18% less than they did before the pink slip came along.

Breadcrumbs:
One Darryl Woods, then CEO of a bank in Missouri, has admitted in
court to using $ 381,487 of TARP funds his bank received to buy
himself a house in Florida. “Using”. That's different than
stealing, right?

Best
Friends Forever:
If one of your Facebook friends gets in financial trouble, unfriend
him. Immediately. Data miners are starting to build profiles of you
that include your contacts with deadbeats, on the theory that it
takes one to know one. Social connection with poor credit risks
will, under their scheme, make you a poor credit risk, too. No, it
doesn't work the other way around.

One
Size Fits Some: US banks banked $42.2 billion in profits in
the second quarter of the year. The average worker hasn't had a
raise in real terms since 1979, official unemployment is at 7.4%, and
there are over 4 million long-term unemployed – mostly 55 and
older.

Datapoint:
Real median household income is now 7.2% below its January 2000
level. Virtually every economic group (except the 1%, of course)
"has been adversely affected, almost every group is worse off
now than it was four years ago,” So much for the much celebrated
US economic recovery.

Handyman
Hint: Ethanol is bad for lawn mowers and other small gasoline engines.
If there's not a station near you that sells non-ethanol gasoline,
go out of your way to find one. If you must use the stuff, buy it in
small amounts - and don't store it over the winter.

The Parting Shot:

Hairy milk pea, Galactia volubilis ?

Note: SAR
is taking a few days off and postings may be erratic until
mid-September.

Thursday, August 29, 2013

Rematch:
Speaker Boehner says that the Republicans will not raise the debt
ceiling unless they get 'matching' reductions in federal spending -
without touching Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, farm programs
and Congressional pensions. Obama's not inclined to negotiate at
all, maintaining that the federal debt is the result of
Congresscritters like Boehner passing laws that spend money without
having the guts to raise taxes to pay for the programs. Beating up
the current administration for the ills of a couple of decades of
Congressional cowardice simply doesn't seem reasonable. But the
Republicans
do not need to be 'reasonable' - they have cut up congressional
districts so their seats are safe as long as they keep the rightest
of the right wing nuts happy. This game of chicken will come to a
head in mid-October, reserve your seats now.

Times
Change:
When it is one of our (albiet temporary) friends that uses
chemical weapons, like Saddam, it is ignored. Plausible denial,
y'know, when the thug is one of ours.

Morality
And Sanctity:The
ongoing portrayal of public workers' pension contracts as disposable
tissues shows just how little respect for contracts the banksters and
their henchmen have when it doesn't involve their own bonuses for
bankrupting companies. The 'elites' are happy to treat the contracts
that provide workers with pensions as worthless scraps of paper.
(Exhibit A is Detroit, B is Chicago, more to follow.)) The
banksters, who made off with the pension funds, now find it
inconvenient to uphold their part of the contract. So they will
wiggle out through bankruptcy, even though these pension obligations
are guaranteed under the state constitution. The only thing that's
guaranteed is that the rich will steal the money and leave the
workers pensionless. New
BFF:
Over 70 countries made requests for users' data from Facebook,
Google, Microsoft – our own government itself made tens of
thousands of them, even though few governments need to go to others
to track you down. Supposedly the vast majority of these requests
relate to criminal cases. Supposedly.

Restocking:
The number of existing homes on the market has increased by 24% so
far this year. Some say this is because the increase in sales and
prices has prompted more folks to put thier homes on the market, now
that they might break even and get out of their mortgages. Others
suggest that the inventory is growing because the baseless surge in
activity is petering out. Either way, more houses on the market
usual result less upward pressure on prices.

The
Rules of Law:
In 2011, FISA Court Judge John Bates noted that 'The court is
troubled that..” That three times in three years the government
had to appear in the FISA court and admit that it had told the court
“substantial” lies in misrepresenting “the scope of a major
collection program.” Good thing they're on our side.

Wanna
Bet?
Just when you thought the Federal Government was with the program,
the Department of Veterans Affairs says that Title 38 of the US Code
defines "spouse" as a person of the opposite sex and as
long as it does, DVA doesn't care about what other laws may say, they
say the language of USC 38 rules. Wait till you hear some of the
language our veterans will use.

Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Playbill:
Amid the allegations being traded in Syria about chemical weapons,
in Istanbul the Syrian National Coalition elected Ghassan Hitto
'prime minister' of an interim government to control the rebel-held
areas of Syria. Hitto is a Syrian-born US citizen and if this starts
to sound familiar, it should. His 'election' is seen by many as the
price the US demanded the rebels pay to receive Western arms and aid.

In
The Kitchen:
Now that the crisis caused by the housing bubble is over (sic) we are
faced with the enormous bubble in central banking that grew to
contain it. Our economies no longer have isolated bubbles, they have
become a chain of bubbles upon bubbles with no apparent end. The cure
has become as dangerous as the disease.

Forecast:
Soothsayers now say that the Republican's Big Budget Battle will not
be fought in October (over the continuing resolution to continue the
unresolved budget problems) but in November (by denying the Treasury
the ability to issue any more bonds). All to 'make a stand' against
the Affordable Care Act. While the governmental lurching to a halt
that failing to pass at least a continuing resolution (no way an
actual budget is ever going to be passed again) would be bad, the
damage failing to raise the debt limit would do would be economically
disastrous - immediately and with world-wide and lasting damage.
That it would also be disastrous to the political future of the
Republican Party does not seem to bother them at all. Wouldn't
bother me, either.

Slip
Sliding:
The June Case-Shiller house price index showed a modest 0.89%
increase m/m. This was the third consecutive decline in the growth
rate of house prices, and the smallest increase in nearly a year.
Bob Shiller views the current housing market with skepticism, "none
of this is real, the housing market has gotten very speculative.'
And then he added the kiss of death, describing the current housing
market as "driven by irrational exuberance." Is there an
echo in here?

Fine,
Just Fine:
The US is demanding a minimum of $6 billion from JPMorgan for losses
due to the 'London Whale' scam in “mis-selling” MBS. JPMorgan
is, of course resisting – if only because it would set a bad
precedent and encourage others to join the feast.

Medical
Costs:
Women's healthcare is more expensive than men's because women have
breasts. See, you can learn a lot by watching FOX. Overtly
Covert:
Police at Wisconsin's Capitol building tackled and beat a
photographer recording a progressive group singing about love and
democracy. They also tackled and hauled off two men who were were
just standing there watching while black. The whole thing was
captured on the capitol's covert surveillance cameras. What do these
cops tell their kids when they get home?

Rose
Is Rose: The state
programs set up to implement the Affordable Care Act all have their
own names, and none is called 'Obamacare'. It won't be long before
Obamacare's happy customers are calling Washington and demanding not
to be forced to join Obamacare because they have such a good state
program. The Parting Shot:

Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Nostalgia:
A few members of Congress, who haven't been paying attention for
the last decade or two, think Obama needs Congressional authorization
to start another war. Silly. It won't be a war. You think the
administration that hassn't seen Morsi's removal by the military as a
coup is going to have trouble finding verbal camouflage for anther
Great Adventure? Fun
And Profit:
Google (and
others) were paid millions of dollars by NSA (if not by the CIA)
to help them violate all sorts of privacy statements and reassurances
while advancing State Department and CIA agendas around the world.
Back in the 1930's there was a word for this sort of thing...
fascism.

'Unexpectedly'
Meets The Recovery:
Orders for durable goods fell 7.3% in July, indicating that US
manufacturing's recovery will be a bit less robust than the fan club
claimed.Dance
Steps: Why has the Fed
given up on America’s unemployed? Last year's theory was that
almost all US unemployment was cyclical and thus reparable through
stimulus. So Ben kept giving money to the banks and pretended it was
a stimulus. Now high unemployment (even masked by other factors) is
becoming a fact of life. Next year we'll see 7% cited as the
'natural rate of unemployment'. Seems that the cyclical part of
unemployment is only curable in an expanding economy. Seems that
giving Goldman Sachs sacks of money drives up asset prices without
driving down employment. Oh, well, they tried – not too hard, but
a little. Time to tighten monetary policy and make unemployment
worse, just in case inflation might still be a word in the
dictionary.

Asked
& Equivocated: “Can
you solve a debt problem with more debt?” Maybe, just maybe...
Not in the real world, of course, but who lives there anyway?

Three,
Two, One, Zero:
Global warming is not something that is going to suddenly happen
come January 1, 2100. It is already happening. It is happening in
our forests - they are drying out and burning. It is seen in our
more frequent and harsher storms
and hurricanes. It is acidifying
our oceans a rate unparalleled in the life of the oceans
for at least 250 million years ' setting up feedback cycles that
will make future unrecognizable. At the rate we're not doing
anything about the 90 million tones of CO2 we dump into the
atmosphere every day, January 2100 may not happen on a world we'd
recognize. Business as usual is a suicide pact. Burning all that
shale gas is playing Russian Roulette with an automatic. We – you
and me and that fellow over there - we need to reduce our CO2
emissions. To zero. Very suddenly. Keep
Your Charity At Home: The
Raleigh,
NC City Council, at the behest of the good old boy developers and
real estate speculators, is pressuring the police to 'clean up'
downtown by threatening to arrest charity groups for feeding the
homeless – which they've been doing for six years. But that was
before the homeless became an inconvenience to redevelopment profits.

Acts
Of Contrition:
Obama has granted Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the rest permanent
absolution for any and all of the war crimes they instigated,
ordered, or condoned while in office. They cannot be sued, no matter
how egregious their crimes. The President most certainly hopes that
what goes around comes around.

Monday, August 26, 2013

Is
Assad An Idiot? As the
Washington warmongers move closer to starting Afghanistan 2.0 or Iraq
Light, the question arises: Why would Syria's Assad launch a chemical
attack while UN inspectors were in town? Why would he do the one
thing that would upset Putin? What would he gain by provoking Obama
into action? Why use gas against women and children and not against
the al-Qaeda and US backed rebels? Ask yourself what Assad had to
gain, as opposed to what the rebels stand to gain. Not to mention
the warmongers back in DC.

Halving
The Dream: Boby Jindal
took the anniversary of The Speech to explain that racism in the US
persists because blacks insist on being black, and George Will
lectured to the oppressed that it was single motherhood and not white
discrimination that was the problem. Meanwhile, in South Carolina a
group of black diners were ejected because they
wanted to sit at the whites only lunch counter
a couple of whites felt 'intimidated'. Wannabe
Ted Cruz chimed in, claiming that repealing the Affordable Care
Act would help Africa-Americans somehow or other. On a positive note,
Colin Powell says (hopes, really) that the Republican
imposed suppression of black votes is "going to backfire"
against them. Door
To Door: It's been fun,
watching the real estate apologists explain away the god-awful
downward trend in new home sales. “Remember, it's just one month's
data,” they say, ignoring the previous two months. “The downward
revisions were expected,” they say, but don't suggest that the bad
July numbers will also be revised downward. “Rising mortgage rates
show up in New Home sales first,” they say, which should simply
prepare you for a drop in existing home sales, not cheer you up.
This could be a
really big deal, pay attention.

Correction:
The headline read: 'Politics has Doomed the Climate Change Debate.'
Wrong, it is not the debate that is doomed, it's us.

I'm
Loving It: While stopping
nasty terrorist plots left and right and reading all of your emails,
NSA also found time to 'occasionally read the private communications
of their ex-lovers. Some suggest that every pillow in every
cheap motel in the DC area is wired; maybe so, but not always by
NSA. Even so, the guys at Fort Meade found time to break
the UN's encrypted communications, as well as – one certainly
hopes – 98% of all the diplomatic codes in current use. Them
That Has, Has Mattresses:
Turns out that one of the brakes on inflation is that the rich are
keeping 37% of their cash out of circulation. Identity
Theft:
A major legacy of the Greater Recession is the four million
long-term unemployed, folks who can't get their resumes read, can't
even get hired at McDonald's. Why is that, do they lack education?
Nope. Is it because they're black or Latino or something? Nope.
Are they old farts? Well, yes. But mostly, the long term unemployed
are simply the short term unemployed who didn't luck into a job, week
after week, month after month. And pretty much it is not their
fault.

Sleazy
Exits Stage Left:
Clueless and unrepentant, San Diego's Bob Filner is done as Mayor,
but he's not sure why. He maintains he did nothing wrong, that his
inappropriate words and groping was just his way of making friends
and “had no intention to be offensive...” Just think what it'd
have been like if he tried.

Saturday, August 24, 2013

If our lives and liberty were not at
stake, this whole affair would be a hilarious sitcom.

Plot
Thickener: The
Independent attributed a sensational revelation about Great Britain
running a “secret internet-monitoring station in the Middle East”
to “documents obtained from the NSA by Edward Snowden.” Trouble
is, Snowden said he was not the source for this or any other
revelation made by The Independent. Okay, then who? And why?

No-Fly
Zone: The Obama
administration wants Congress to allow Obama to sign the super-secret
Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty – turning sovereignty over to
international corporations – before the document is even presented
to Congress for debate. Fat chance.

Inconvenient
Coincidences: A study in
the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences revealed that the
closer the source of your water is to a hydraulically fractured gas
well, the more likely it is that your water will be contaminated with
methane. Correlation does not prove causation, but it might put a
damper on fracking. Sauce:
The Army sergeant who killed 16 Afghan civilians on a killing spree
as been given life without parole for the massacre. How long should
Bush/Cheney & Friends get for the massacre of tens of thousands
of civilians in their Great Adventure in Iraq? Or Obama, for his
rising toll in Yemen?

Enthusiasm
Lite; New home sales fell
20% M/M in July, and sales for April, May, and June were revised
downward 1,5%, 4.3%, and 8.4%respectively (all are SAAR). There
will be a slight pause while exculpatory myths are rounded up.

Magic
Elixir:
That part of the story about US energy independence that depends on
the falling demand for petroleum has been put on temporary hold as US
demand rose sharply in July to the highest level in three years. The
Story Behind The Story:
Al Jazeera America debuted with a half hour presentation on climate
change, which was more than CNN and Fox had given the issue – the
most important of our time – in the past 4 months. How long before
Al Jazeer realizes that the American viewer has been too dumbed down
to appreciate being treated like a sensible, thinking adult?

Jobs
Description: "A big
part of the capitalist exercise is to find or create workers to
exploit."

Eye
of the Beholder:
The Columbia, SC City Council has instructed the police to remove
“unsightly homeless people” from the business district in order
to improve the city's “quality of life.” The police chief was
reluctant to enforce the ordinance because “homelessness is not a
crime.” Even if they are unsightly.

Breadwinner:
Elton McCabe just keeps trying. First he kidnapped a businessman in
South Sudan and held him for ransom. US Sen David Vitter (Reptile,
LA) interceded and got McCabe freed from that one. Now he's been
convicted of extorting a $60,000 bribe in order to steer a $3.2
million military contract in Afghanistan to 'friends'. His defense:
He was “trying to provide for his family." Found guilty, he
must serve ten months in a federal facility. He'll probably end up
leasing it to someone.

Friday, August 23, 2013

Drip,
Drip, Drip:
The latest Snowden 'leak' details a secret internet surveillance base
run by the UK in the Middle East, where it taps into and monitors
underwater fiber-optic cables to intercept emails, telephone calls
and web traffic on behalf of Western intelligence agencies. It is,
of course, part of the war on the
terror of private citizens having any privacy
terror.

Misnomer:
Turns out that trading options on NASDAQ Thrusday afternoon was not
an option, nor was trading stocks. Here's
A Plan:
Instead of working to extend access to health insurance to the
citizens of Wisconsin, Republican Gov. Scott Walker plans to cut more
people from Medicaid under ACA – over 90,000 - than any other
state. This is not a refusal to extend Medicaid to those intended to
benefit under ACA, this is kicking 90,000 people off of the program.
Wisconsin is one of only four states that will reduce their Medicaid
eligibility. This is not a mater of money, for Wisconsin is turning
down millions in ACA funding. This is simple meaness. Republican,
self-righteous meanness. Paragraph
47(b) Subsection 381:
Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America says that the Affordable Care
Act will require gun owners to undergo electroshock therapy. And
just in time, too.

Let
Me Count The Ways: Here
are a few relatively new feedback-loop candidates that will be
drifing up the rate of global climate change: methane hydrates
bubbling up from Arctic Ocean. Rapidly growing methane vents in
Siberia. Methane release in the Antarctic. Warming permafrost.
Warming peat bogs. Forest fires in Siberia and North America
feeding ever more soot to come settling down on the Greenland Ice
Cap. Warm Atlantic waters keep pouring into the Arctic, melting ice
from below. The slowing of the thermohaline conveyor belt. And so
on, possibly leading to a climactic Heinrich
Event in Greenland, where it all falls apart in a massive surge.

Caveat:
Investigators report that a baby in India "almost surely"
is not spontaneously combusting. Almost surely.

Welcome
to the Age of Denial:
Today it is politically effective and socially acceptable to deny
scientific fact. Long ago it was this way, too. Then we had a few
hundred years of science and progress and now we're back to
irrational beliefs and wish-fulfillment fantasies , lost in denial
and seeking salvation through myths and blind faith.

On
Math:
Math is the language of nature, can predict the future, and its
mastery is true power. It is also fun. And it can be abused. Is. Again:
Between 2000 and 2012, working Americans wages did not grow. Not a
bit. The
Speed Zone Ahead: While
geology sets the final limit to oil recovery, the effective
limitation is primarily financial. The recent history of oil
exploration and extraction is one of every scarcer resources ever
more expensively found and extracted. The expense is both in
monetary terms – it simply costs more – and in energy terms –
it simply costs more. This is a one way street of every more
expensive diminishing returns that will inevitably cripple our
economy. No one knows what the downslope will be like, just that it
is inevitable and no adequate (financial cost, energy cost, or energy
effectiveness to replace liquid fuels) is in sight.

Asked
&Avoided:
Are the rich getting too much of the economic pie? Define 'too
much'.

Thursday, August 22, 2013

Sometimes
you have to pay a heavy price to live in a free society.Bradley
Manning

You
Say Potato:
Obama says "we don't have a domestic spying program."
What he meant was that NSA - 'The
abyss from which there is no return' - isn't domesticated. Seems
the guys from Fort Meade 'scan' at least 75% of American web traffic,
emails and all. The other 25% if squirrels away to read another day.

Differences:
If you, or I, heaven forbid, make a poorly advised investment
through our brokerage account at Goldman Sachs, well, too bad, but
that's the way the market works. Some lose, some win. But when
Goldman Sachs makes a poorly advised investment through its
rapid-fire computer trading, well... It wants its several hundred
million buckaroos back. And will probably get them, too. One size,
it seems, does not fit all.

Noted: JPMorgan complains that the
US spends “pathetically little on infrastructure compared to the
rest of the civilized world.” Where did they get the idea that we
were civilized?

Why
I hate economists:
In figuring out how much austerity has hurt us (and the economy),
the general rule is to ask how much higher the GDP would have been
without the effects of the austerity measurs. But, and here's where
I reach for the air sickness bag, many economists say that overstates
things unless we take into consideration the value of the extra
leisure the unemployed and marginally employed are enjoying.

Après
Nous, le Déluge:
It may not be long before it will be impossible for journalists to
have confidential sources. Most reporting – indeed, most human life
in 2013 – leaves too much of a digital fingerprint for the concept
of 'confidential' to survive.

Economics:
The art of making exact predictions based on assumptions about unmeasurable things.

Informed
Citizens:
A poll showed that Louisiana Republicans are more likely to blame
Obama than Bush for the poor federal response to Hurricane Katrina,
which happened in 2005.

Once
More, Without Feeling:
Collateralized debt obligations, the complex financial instruments
that cratered disastrously in the financial crisis, are back. In the
bad old days they were frequently gamed to the tune of subprime
mortgages. Today they are being played with chips from assorted
squirrelly loans. Instead of being called CDO, they're now called
CLO. See, it's different this time.

Kindling:
Someone paid for research that determined that US Senators
represent their wealthiest constituents at the expense of those lower
on the food chain.

Healthcare,
The Score:
The public doesn’t like what it thinks the Democrats did. But it
really
doesn’t like what it thinks the Republicans will do. And rightly
so, for the Republicans have no idea what they will do after
repealing Obamacare.

Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Motions,
Going Through:
The Guardian, knowing that it had encrypted copies of the Snowden
documents 'elsewhere' happily went along with Great Britain's GCHQ in
the "slightly pointless" task of destroying computer hard
drives in the newspaper's press offices. Chrysalis:
If Caterpillar, the global economy's signpost, reports successive
monthly global retail sales of -7%, -8% and now -9%. Their
Asia/Pacific (for which read China) y/y results were down 28%. It
Was Only Business...
Pakistan's former president, Pervez Musharraf, will stand trial for
his alleged role in the murder of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Credit,
Where Due:
JCPenney wants everyone to know that their crappy results should be
blamed on Bill Ackman and not the customer; that the company went
through $2.1 billion
in the first six months of the year was strategy.
That noise you hear off-stage is the fat lady, warming up.

The
Headline:
Man’s scrotum swelled to 132 pounds due to lack of health
insurance. Don't go there. Where
In The World Is...
The Obama administration wants the Supremes to bless warantless
cellphone searches by any and all police agencies, school
principals and parking lot attendants.
They say the 16 gigabytes of personal information stored on your
iPhone is the same as a pone number scribbled on the back of a book
of matches. Really. They say the Fourth Amendment allows warantless
searches, along with indefinite detention, torture, and death by
drone.

Some
Numbers:
In June, Saudi Arabia produced 9.64 million barrels of oil and
exported 7.32 million. The first number is lower than May, the second
higher. Rinse and repeat. Just
Justification:
The British government now claims to have found ‘highly sensitive
stolen information that would help terrorism’ on a computer
belonging to David Miranda, Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald's
partner. It is obvious that the UK and the US have been tracking
anyone close to Snowden or Greenwald and intends to harass each and
evey one of them. Sort of a tantrum to vent their displeasure. Sounds
Like:
In Mulberry , Florida, Pastor Terry Jones intends to burn 2,998
Korans on September 11.
He says he respects Muslims, just can't abide Islam. This sort of
thing never happened in Mayberry.

Orphans:
PG&E says that the $2.25 billion penalty it has been assessed
for the 2010 pipeline explosion that killed 8 is too severe and will
have to seek bankruptcy as a way to avoid paying the judgment.

Enigma
Machine:
The right-wing Heritage Foundation is frothing at the mouth about
stopping the “unconstitutional” attempt by Congress and the
President, with the support of the Supreme Court, to take care of the
sick and the poor among us.

Your
Results May Vary:
A new study suggests that the more sex you have, the higher your
income, even if you're not a prostitute in the traditional sense.

Questions:
Mr. President, why have you not closed Guantanamo? Why do you treat
whistle-blowers as though they were terrorists? Why is the US
prison population so high and why does the nation keep executing
prisoners at a pace and rate higher than North Korean and Yemen and
nearly tie with China and Iran? Mr. President, if you can justify
killing your own citizens by drone strike, how many innocent
foreigners do you think is acceptable to kill because they are in the
in the wrong place at the wrong time? How do you justify NSA's
operations in light of what used to be the US Constitution? Should
Americans be able to send an email without it being read by the
government?

Tuesday, August 20, 2013

The
Best Defense:
Saudi Arabia, which fears democracy nearly as much as it fears the
Islamist terrorists it finances, says it will step in and replace any
funds the West withholds from Egypt. "A
huge amount of radiation:"
A storage tank is leaking highly contaminated, highly radioactive
water at the Fukushima nuclear disaster site. The 300 ton breach is
separate from the ongoing 300 ton a day leak previously reported and
is so contaminating that a worker near the leak would develp
radiation sickness withing 10 hours.

Markdown:
JCPenny's same-store sales fell 11.9% in the second quarter, with a
net loss of $586 million. It ain't over 'til it's over, but it's
getting pretty damned close.

Cornucopia:One
of the basic concepts in the oil and gas industry is called 'profit'.
The general idea is that oil companies look for places where they
can acquire drilling rights, drill and extract hydrocarbons and sell
them profitably. Shell has joined BP in tossing in the towel on
their fracking operations because fracking has managed to produce so
much natural gas that it cannot be sold for a profit given the low
price, the cost of drilling and the disappointing life-span of
productive wells. Now
It Can Be Told: The CIA
now acknowledges that it “was involved” in the overthrow of
Iran's Prime Minister Mosaddeq “after he sought to nationalize the
Iranian oil industry.” Who would'a guessed?

Politician:
For wholly inexplicable reasons (political payoff is the only thing
that comes to mind) the Obama administration wants the Trans Pacific
Partnership freedom to loot agreement to specifically give tobacco
companies
zero tariffs, expanded investor rights, and greater limits on
regulation of tobacco advertising. It would also give these
merchants of death the ability to render null and void any and all
state
and national regulations and legislation that would hamper their
harvesting of profits by killing their customers.

Scouting
Report:
A couple of confused Christian radio guys who don't quite get the
concept are telling their listeners that the Boy Scouts are now
offering merit badges in sodomy, incest and cannibalism.

One
Size Fits: Have you
noticed on the evening news that SWAT officers in a growing number of
cities and states are wearing the exact same combat gear as US troops
wore in Iraq – with different colors for flack jackets and helmets
and in urban, not desert camouflage? And they are doing things the
way the military does – from task command organization to
pre-positioning standardized equipment. what we’re doing, is we’re
building a military force for deployment against US citizens. But
just because the police departments have weaponry more suitable for
Iraq than “the land of the free” doesn’t guarantee them victory
here any more than it did there.

Noted:
Technology has to be economically feasible or it doesn’t matter.

Short
Form:
ACA/Obamacare rests on three rather clear principles: Everyone gets
coverage. Everyone pays for coverage. Those that cannot afford
coverage will get support/subsidies from the government. Now that
wasn't hard, was it? And no it does not require “an
abortion in every household.”

Non
Sequitur: Using fossil
fuels is anti-social, investing in them is unethical. So? What's that got to do with me?

Over
Diagnosis:
What if you were irradiated, sliced and diced and saturated with
chemicals because a scan or a biopsy picked up a cancer that was
either slow moving or not life-threatening? Perhaps people survive
early-stage cancers not because they’re treated in time, but
because their disease never would have become life-threatening at
all. The question is how many 'some' is, and whether you are in the
'yea' or 'nay' cohort. Early diagnosis may lead to prevention, it
most certainly can lead to health-threatening and quite possibly
unneeded treatment. It is entirely possible to be a cancer-treatment
survivor without ever having had cancer.

Our Motto

Keep fightin' for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don't you forget to have fun doin' it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin' ass and celebratin' the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.